Upon re - reading this last post I see that I have the ultimate objection to becoming af and I believe it: I’m not ready.
I don’t know why I believe I’m not ready to become af. It’s not fear. I have no fear of becoming or being af. My belief is I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. It must be that I don’t want it bad enuf. I don’t know why I don’t want it bad enuf. It seems like something is missing. I don’t know what,
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One familiar objection that is coming up now is I am back to feeling good which is good enuf.
I’m stuck now on feeling good and enjoying and appreciating. I’ve stayed here for long periods of time in the past. No urge to becoming af. My objection is to making the effort necessary to go all the way. This is easy, I don’t have to do anything to stay here. I’ve always taken the easy way out. Just do as much as I have to. On top of that I really don’t know how to move on. There is no need.
Ok, let me tune in to pure intent. I have a clear memory of it from a pce. That seems like the next step from where I am right now.
Hi James,
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When you have sincerely decided to act on your excellent insight that taking “the easy way out” is not enough (because it only results in a resigned attitude towards life), the first thing to do is to read the instruction manual, i.e. “This Moment of Being Alive” including the very instructive tool-tips.
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Then you check if you enjoy and appreciate each moment of being alive, because the latter is the key to both increasing your enjoyment and consequently your appreciation of being alive.
To understand the word appreciation you can look at its opposite - depreciation = devaluation, cheapening, reduction in value, disparage. Hence appreciation means assessing of the true worth or value of persons or things and thus adding value, enriching, encouraging (the expansion of your value assessment), highly regarding, cherishing, marvelling.
Appreciation is the very key to exponentially increase the level of your enjoyment, expand it in scope and depth, so that you are able to see more and more how the universe is happening with wondrous perfection in all the various, minute and large, details of life and matter. Encouraging naiveté is an essential ingredient to marvelling, delight and wonderment.
Note: without applying appreciation one would merely dabble in the real-world self-help advice of “don’t worry, be happy” [link] which has naught to do with the actualism method.
- With the ongoing increase in appreciation and the consequent appreciative enjoyment it will be easy to follow Richard’s instructions further –
[Richard]: “one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ … and after that to ‘feeling excellent’ […] to the point of excellence being the norm”.
[Richard]: Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination … and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive … one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here … even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here … and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here … and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now … then one has arrived before one starts.
- Then, when your are more and more at home feeling excellent you can make the daring decision (as an active step) to let the universe live you, in lieu of ‘you’ dictating and controlling your life.
[Richard]: Lastly, the actualism method segues into what has become known as the actualism process when the actualism method has become so automatic, via habituation, that one is walking about in a state of wide-eyed wonder (naiveté) simply marvelling at being alive (sensuosity) and being amazed/ delighted that all this – the world about/the universe itself – is occurring in the first place; the actualism process is when it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the difference between one doing it (doing this business called being alive) and it happening of its own accord; when one becomes the experiencing of being alive/of it all occurring of its own accord one is then out-from-control (not ‘out of control’ as in wayward) and a different-way-of-being has ensued.
It all becomes rather magical (‘magical’ as in prestidigitation) after that. (Claudiu - Reports of his Meeting Richard & Vineeto)
This ongoing actualism process has been described on this forum in excellent details by @Claudiu (and lots of follow-ups) and recently by @Kuba.
Ok James, pull up the anchor and enjoy being on your way once more.
Cheers Vineeto
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@Vineeto Thank you for this wonderful reply. This is a great restart guide. TMOBA is pure gold which I had forgotten about. Also need to review your tips on appreciation. The challenge now is to actually do it and to stick with it this time by overcoming my objections. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all right now.
Thank you for this timely reminder @Vineeto. I probably mistranslated “appreciate” to a more anemic word in my mind and then proceeded to run with it for a good 15 years.
It took me until about a month ago to realize that it’s anything but anemic. It’s funny how this understanding has leaked through lately even though I’ve been bad at actively engaging it (down to getting comments about how positive I am, which is as close to a personality transplant as you’d get)
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Hi @Emp,
Thank you for this timely reminder @Vineeto. I probably mistranslated “appreciate” to a more anaemic word in my mind and then proceeded to run with it for a good 15 years. link
You very likely did – something like ‘noticing in a positive way’. Never mind that you used the anaemic meaning for 15 years – it’s always great to start afresh with a new insight and enjoy that it works.
To emphasize how significant the word “appreciate”/ “appreciation” is, to everyone who had similar misconceptions about it, let me start by saying that it appears five times in the running banners of “This Moment of Being Alive” – the very article that has the succinct instructions how to become free from the human condition –
“Consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is the actualism method.”
“The means to the end – an ongoing enjoyment and appreciation – are no different to the end.”
“Enjoyment and appreciation are facilitated by feeling as happy and as harmless as possible.”
“A slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness.”
“Attentiveness to the cause of diminished enjoyment and appreciation restores felicity/innocuity.”
“Consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is what the actualism method is.”
Appreciation is the most potent aspect of the actualism method because as I said before – it “is the very key to exponentially increase the level of your enjoyment, expand it in scope and depth” […] to the point of excellence being the norm. It is the key to upgrade your “hedonic adaptation set-point" from feeling grumpy, to feeling neutral, to feeling good and to feeling excellent as the new set-point to fall back upon, so that even when ‘you’ come back from a PCE you no longer fall back to feeling bad/neutral, but you ‘fall back’ to feeling good/excellent. Consistently appreciating the world and people and events around you can and will enable you to reset your genetically/socially inherited hedonic set-point.
It took me until about a month ago to realize that it’s anything but anaemic. It’s funny how this understanding has leaked through lately even though I’ve been bad at actively engaging it (down to getting comments about how positive I am, which is as close to a personality transplant as you’d get).
It seems to have already worked marvellous for you, Emp – “a personality transplant” is no small thing to bring about. Now when you do it more actively and consciously, perhaps even as a deliberate decision and commitment to feel good/excellent for the rest of your life, it will be even more of a palpable “personality transplant” beyond recognition of the old Emp.
And it is such fun!
Cheers Vineeto
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This is so great! I have also done the same thing, appreciation was seen as just a word that happened to follow enjoyment. This makes complete sense now though, and experientially I can confirm that with appreciation the level of enjoyment can increase exponentially, both in scope and depth.
It’s almost like I have a new toy to play with now, and as this appreciative enjoyment increases it then morphs into marvelling and wonderment and then things get so fun. It is also handy that I can consciously set my intent towards appreciating, and from there it seems there in no cap on how wonderful things can get.
The other interesting thing is that the difference between appreciation and gratitude is clear as day.
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Thank you @Vineeto for this explanation and emphasis on appreciation 
I’ve always wondered why this phrase was cemented into the actulaism method, not only be happy and harmless or enjoy this moment - but also appreciate this moment of being alive in whatever form it takes. And today while experimenting with this “fresh” information it became clear to me how appreciation, i.e. being a person who appreciates whatever is happening to him, is tightly connected to being naive because I could not bring myself to be like this without feeling a bit foolish, a real simpleton!
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Hi @Almog,
You hit the nail right on the head. Becoming naïve is indeed “tightly connected” to be able to “appreciate this moment of being alive whatever form it takes.”
It takes a bit of courage because we are so earnestly instructed and conditioned to be serious and weary but when you do allow yourself to be sincerely naïve, “a bit foolish”, as you say, you will experience that you are both likeable and liking, i.e. that you like yourself and also like your fellow human beings.
[Richard]: The way to be both likeable and liking – to be as near to innocence as is possible whilst remaining a ‘self’ – is to retrieve and resurrect your long-lost naïveté (locked away in childhood, per favour the scorn, ridicule and derision poured forth upon it by the worldly-wise cynics and sophisticates, due to an infantile/ juvenile inability to separate out being naïve from being gullible), nowadays made readily possible by virtue of your adult sensibilities, and operate and function in the world at large by being naïveté itself (thus by-passing/ over-riding that instinctually/ viscerally felt core-of-being centre of ‘self’). (Mailing List 'D' Martin).
When you are both likeable and liking it is no longer important what other people might think of you (“a bit foolish, a real simpleton”) – you have unilaterally changed the parameters of how you like to feel and act in the world of people-as-they-are – naïvely. It is a delight to be sincerely naïve because from that vantage point you like your fellow human beings and you like yourself.
[Richard]: And as ‘he’ stood there, delightedly extolling the virtues of being naiveté itself, ‘he’ enthusiastically encouraged ‘his’ rapt audience to reach down inside of themselves intuitively (a.k.a. feeling it out) going past the rather superficial emotions and/or feelings (generally in the chest area) into the deeper, more profound passions and/or feelings (generally in the solar plexus area) until they came to a place (generally about four-finger widths below the navel) where they intuitively feel they elementarily have existence as a feeling being (as in ‘me’, at the core of ‘my’ being, which is ‘being’ itself), and, having located ‘being’ itself, gently and tenderly sense out the area immediately below that (just above and/or just before and almost touching on the sex centre) where they would find themselves both likeable and liking (for here lies sincerity and/or naiveté) and here is where they can, finally, like themself (very important) no matter what, for here is the nearest a ‘self’ can get to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’, and, moreover, here lies tenderness and/or sweetness and togetherness and/or closeness because here is where it is possible to be the key which unlocks the potency of naiveté. (A Rather Quaint Claypit-Tale).
[Richard]: A rather quaint clay-pit tale which nonetheless depicts the range of naïveness from being sincere to becoming naïve and all the way through being naïveté itself⁽⁰¹⁾ to an actual innocence.
⁽⁰¹⁾To be naïveté itself (i.e., naïveté embodied as a childlike persona with adult sensibilities), which is to be the closest one can to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’ (innocence is where ‘self’ is not), one is both likeable and liking for herewith lies tenderness and/or sweetness and togetherness and/or closeness whereupon moment-to-moment experiencing is of traipsing through the world about in a state of wide-eyed wonder and amazement as if a child again (guileless, artless, ingenuous, innocuous)—yet with adult sensibilities whereby the distinction betwixt being naïve and being gullible is readily separable—simply marvelling at the sheer magnificence of this oh-so-material universe’s absoluteness and unabashedly delighting in its boundless beneficence, its limitless largesse, as being the experiencing is inherently cornucopian (due to the near-absence of agency which ensues when the controlling doer is abeyant and the naïve beer is ascendant), with a blitheness and a gaiety such that the likelihood of the magical fairy-tale-like nature of this paradisaical terraqueous globe, this bounteously verdant and azure planet, becoming ever-so-sweetly apparent, as an experiential actuality, is almost always imminent. (A Rather Quaint Claypit-Tale). [last tooltip at the bottom of the page]
And here, Almog and @Jonathan, is a wonderful opportunity of experiencing many, many ‘wow’-moments.
Cheers Vineeto
Hello, @Vineeto , it’s so nice to read you here.
I don’t remember having read such emphasis on appreciation in particular (in the sense that it can be THE element to cause an exponential boost, as you say). It’s one of those words that I’ve misunderstood a lot. At first I took it as the sensorial part (enjoyment = more affective, appreciation = more sensorial). The word has also been somewhat charged with hints of positive/love feelings (such as love and gratitude), at least in Spanish.
All this context to ask: can you tell us some specific examples that you remember from your own past experience in which appreciation was an important factor to get you unstuck or ramped up your actualist experience in given moments, or even created breakthroughs in your journey?
I think such anecdotes can help appreciation fully click for some of us. Thanks so much in advance 
Oo I can help here. You can immediately find out the potency and benefit of appreciation, right here and now, as you’re reading this.
First, if you are not already there, get to a point of feeling good, a very solid enjoyment at the bare minimum.
Are you there? Good!
Now, experientially consider the quality of this feeling good, of this enjoyment, that is happening for you right now. Does it feel good to feel good? Is it enjoyable to be enjoying being alive? Do you like feeling good? It may even be fruitful to contemplate – how exactly do you know that you like it? What about it do you like?
Now compare it to feeling bad – how does it compare? Is it better to feel good than to feel bad? Don’t look for a thought-out answer, just actually answer it for yourself experientially right now.
Appreciation amounts to “assessment of the true worth or value of persons or things” [link]. In other words, if you have followed the instructions, you have been assessing the quality of feeling good, as it is happening now in your experiencing of being alive.
The purpose of this, which you may have already noticed happening, is that now you much more fully… appreciate, as in, “recognize the quality, significance, or magnitude of” [link], just how much better feeling good is, than feeling bad. This drives home the point, experientially, of the sheer wondrousness of feeling good, of enjoying being alive. This directly enables you to be sincere about your purpose of feeling good more and more of the time, because now you see it for yourself, you intimately know just how good it is, so of course obviously it makes sense to nourish and increment it.
This appreciation serves to “lock in” one’s understanding and valuing of enjoying and feeling good, and once it is locked in it serves as a stable point for increasing it further.
Let me know if it helped!
Cheers,
Claudiu
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Thanks for the input, Claudiu. I think you’ve already made this point to me in a past instance. Basically, it is that:
Enjoyment = this feels good
Appreciation = it feels good to feel good
It has a meta function. I do wonder though how to drive appreciation even deeper in a way that it doesn’t remain an intellectual effort and rather it’s a second layer of affect that reinforces and deepens the actualization of it all in the long run. All this in the context of that exponential nature that Vineeto wrote about, that’s an intriguing part that I may be missing. How exactly does the exponential nature come into play? I guess I need to experiment more with it to have an existential answer as well. Been trying to commit more to actualism lately, so this fits great.
Any further input from you or Vineeto will be appreciated 
EDIT: maybe we need to split this and take it to its own “Appreciation” thread?
Update: tapped into that for a bit and I can certainly feel the snowball effect of feeling good → feeling good about feeling good → feeling even better, etc.
I do wonder if this particular activity can help me break the habit of me trying to get distracted/entertainment when feeling good becomes normalized and triggers a “now what?” response. That usually leads me back to normal, so maybe feeling good about feeling good can calm and rechannel that dissatisfaction back to actualism mode?
Hmm so what I wrote wasn’t about a “second layer of affect” at all, but rather something for you to contemplate while reading it, contemplating the quality of the feeling good. It’s more about consciously becoming aware of this quality of feeling good and seeing experientially for yourself this quality.
Well I would first give a sincere attempt of the advice here to see if it works. What happened in your experience as a result of contemplating those questions I posed, and looking not for a worded thought-out answer but rather an experiential one?
That is wonderful to hear. Truly there is magic in the air 
Cheers,
Claudiu
Fair. It was more an attempt from me to make further sense and implement it in a more meaningful way, but maybe it’s not the most accurate way of framing it. This is what I tried to mean:
The mere awareness or even contemplation could be interpreted to be done merely intellectually, and from that interpretation one may fall in the trap of saying “well, duh, obviously: feeling good feels good, so tell me something I don’t know”.
But if we try to take it to the affective realm it can have a deeper effect, and since the action of enjoying is different than the action of appreciating, I was trying to capture that very affective distinction or flavor.
In a sense, if we were to approach this from this affective awareness (and not merely intellectual), the nature/distinction of this appreciative action may be closer to, say, marvelling than mere enjoyment of enjoying (which also may be present as enjoyment can be enjoyed, but I think there is more to just that). Does that make any sense?
@claudiu that’s interesting because I have been approaching this from a different angle altogether, it seems so at least.
To summarise, the target of appreciation has been the world of people, things and events, not feeling good specifically.
The focus on appreciation started when Vineeto urged us to turn any sadness surrounding Richard’s death into appreciation for his life and his words. Then further to allow this appreciation to ‘spill over’ into appreciating this wonderful universe which exists all around, including the natural world and one’s fellow human beings.
And doing so is what increases both the scope and the depth of enjoyment, it’s essentially assessing the true worth of what this universe is like and what it means to be alive.
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Hmm I would say they are two different things indeed, but that aren’t mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary.
It’s parallel to enjoyment. The way of living life that has come to be known as the actualism method, is one of enjoying this moment of being alive. This does not mean you have to enjoy every thing that happens in your life, particularly unpleasant stuff (like someone throwing a tantrum), but rather that you don’t let those unpleasant things take away from enjoying this moment of being alive. On top of this, however, it is certainly sensible to, and definitely silly not to, enjoy the wonderful things and events that do happen in your life.
So too I would say with appreciating this moment of being alive. On the one hand there is appreciating that it is the only moment of being alive, and how wonderful it is to be spending it enjoying it. On the other, there is appreciating the wonderful things and events that do happen.
And yes, the potent appreciation that has begun happening spontaneously all across the world, that appeared to have started shortly before Richard’s passing, is of course something to partake in and take benefit from and nourish in one’s own life, as it will indeed move one exponentially forward.
I am particularly drawing focus on the “appreciating the enjoyment” aspect because in my experience, in past times, when I would be feeling good, I would not think much of it. And when feeling bad I would feel very bad. At some point when I was feeling good I thought to actually compare the quality of it with feeling bad, and I came to appreciate how immensely better even a basic feeling good was. This appreciation of it did marvels in helping me to cement it and increase it further, it paved the way for higher and more consistent levels of feeling great, excellent, etc.
I’m curious about your thoughts on the matter @Vineeto as it does seem there’s a few different things we’re talking about here.
Cheers,
Claudiu